Believe it or not we got three (edit: four) panicked emails from someone claiming to be related to the project authors who thought it would be a nice surprise to 'help' them out on HN this way. I believed her and told her to let them know they could repost in a few weeks, so long as there would be no more 'help'.

Actually this sort of obvious voting ring is the least of our worries; at this point it basically never has any effect other than grumpy comments by HN users who easily see through it, and often the culprits turn out to be people who are actually doing good work and are clueless about how to promote it, i.e. people much like the rest of us. Why they don't simply post it to HN with a description of why it's interesting is beyond me.